The Longing…

I was looking at Google maps and naturally I scrolled over to Estonia. Zoomed in until I could make out the borders of my home village and the surrounding lakes. Flashes of summer’s days and parties and people appeared in my mind. Onward my thoughts went, towards the roads I travelled by hitch-hiking, to high-school and darn it- I wasn’t ready for the pang that hit the insides.

You see, I’ve been fairly stealthy juggling emotions. I always face emotions head on, even if it is in hindsight. And I always “hide” myself by ignoring and allowing myself feel the true, real, raw emotion. I usually just acknowledge what I am supposed to feel, then take a miniscule fraction of that emotion and slowly let it in. Once I establish it will hurt like a bitch I shut it out and move on. Case closed. Right? This seems to be my coping mechanism.

So this utter longing for those days on the road, those familiar people, the familiar places and those different times just bitch-slapped me. Yes, emotions make us feel alive and sometimes I yearn for an emotion to rattle me because life can become so dull. But we.. I will never be ready for the worst of it… Never be able to accept the real consequences of wanting to feel alive.

The things I have done to feel sometimes… I try to think of myself as a fairly calm person, but the truth is, we all have underlying turmoils. I used to make myself go for midnight walks in the dark. The road took me in between the forest and past the cemetery towards the open fields. I was afraid of dark and the forest itself, afraid of wild animals, perhaps an accidental freak in a car driving past. And the cemetery, of course. The idea of all the broken hearts, loss and tears surrounding the whole place. But I still made myself go. These walks resembled other hardships that needed facing. Instead I walked and thought how great I was for facing my fears. Fooling myself has been the best and the worst trick I ever taught myself.

Why do we lie to ourselves? Why don’t we always let ourselves feel what we’re supposed to feel according to Life’s policies? When is the right time to apologize for being ignorant towards someone’s feelings because we couldn’t face our own- those situations don’t have time-stamps do they?

Can the longing for a past place, situation or someone simply be a landmark of the exact time that we should have made different choices?